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tion of the modernity of the landscape can be found
frequently in French nineteenth-century photography.
In 1855, Edouard Baldus created this truly separate
genre when he photographed the landscape between
Boulogne and Paris changed by the construction of the
railroad. In contrast with the usual picturesque approach
that neglects the traces of industrial modernity, Baldus’
photographs strikingly showed how all kinds of new
constructions, such as railway tracks, viaducts, and
bridges, fi tted perfectly into the landscape. During the
following decades, the photographers employed by the
Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and many others would
depict the spectacle of railroad construction—an indica-
tion of the importance railroads had assumed both in the
changing landscape and in the public consciousness.
This modern stance in French photography can also
be found in the interest in the landscape of the everyday.
As in other countries, the development of French land-
scape photography was unmistakably closely connected
to the practise and theory of landscape painting. In
France, however, other pictorial codes than those of the
picturesque and the sublime were much more relevant.
The work of many French landscape photographers
shows similarities, for instance, with the new realist
and naturalist tendencies in painting that developed in
the era of photography’s inception. The forest of Fon-
tainebleau, which attracted the painters of the so-called
Barbizon circle (Corot, Diaz, Millet, Rousseau) between
1825 and 1860, also became a popular photographic
motif during and after the Second Empire. Painters and
photographers were not only engaged in documenting
a way of life they saw as rapidly slipping away under
the pressures of industrialization, they also searched for
humble subjects that contrasted heavily with the over-
worked picturesque formulas and sublime and pompous
themes of academic painting.
Averse to classical vedute and spectacularly sublime
mountain tops, photographers such as Gustave Le Gray,
Alfred Briquet, Eugène Cuvelier, Constant-Alexandre
Famin, Achile Quinet, Ernest Landrey, John Buckley
Greene, Paul Berthier, and Henri Langerock, among
others, depicted various locations in the forest that be-
came more accessible by the railways from the 1850s
onwards. Some photographers made “Studies from
Nature,” supplying painters with documentation, such
as the Vues artistiques diverses by Famin. Others, such
as Le Gray and Cuvelier, were painters themselves and
made highly personal photographic works that often
focuses on a gloomy and melancholy aspect of nature.
After 1849, Le Gray made many calotypes of trees and
underwood, and he later continued the series using large-
size glass negatives. The perfection of his prints and their
sensibility for lights and shades answer to a pre-Impres-
sionist naturalism that owed little to traditional pictorial
examples. Another photographer closely connected to
the circle of Barbizon painters, was Eugène Cuvelier,
who particularly explored the rocks and sand dunes of
the forest and, in doing so, created pictures reminiscent
of the Rousseau’s paintings in particular. He remained
faithful to the calotype and fully exploited its aesthetic
possibilities: the thickness of the paper negative and
its grainy texture resulted in the sketchy details and
schematic light effects so cherished by the Barbizon
painters and the impressionists.
Many works of the Barbizon photographers show
a remarkable, “impressionist” interest in the play of
light, reaching its climax in Gustave Le Gray’s series
of large-format seascapes. Some of Le Gray’s “marine”
studies give an impression of an instantaneity, which
can suddenly capture the impetuous movement of the
waves. Constructed by means of two separate negatives
(one for the sea, the other for the sky), his more tranquil
seascapes skilfully capture the ways light moves over
the ocean and show backlit skies heavy with clouds or
the sky at sunset.
French landscape photography also included other
specifi c motifs from contemporary impressionist paint-
ing, which, in its turn, borrowed formal features from
the new medium of photography: absence of depth,
abstraction through unusual viewpoints, arbitrary
framings, and so forth. The impressionist fashion for
the outdoors, for instance, resulted in the topographi-
cal genre of middle-class pastimes. Comparable to
famous scenes by the impressionists, people at leisure
were photographed in the outskirts of Paris or in the
recently developed seaside resorts. Olympe Aguado,
an amateur photographer close to the Emperor, was the
leading exponent of this genre that gave evidence of
the urbanization and domestication of the landscape. It
was no accident that the places painted by the impres-
sionists were the suburban landscapes within several
hours’ train commute of Paris. As in many impressionist
paintings, in French landscape photography, nature is
no longer the background of heroic acts (as in classical
landscape painting) or of the sublime terror of natural
forces (as in Romanticism), but has been translated into
the environment of the bourgeois on a summer Sunday
afternoon. As in the landscapes of the Barbizon painters
and the impressionists, a great deal of French landscape
photography is characterized by a dichotomy between
nostalgia for a vanishing agrarian past and an interest in
the emblems of industrial modernity and a specifi cally
modern way of occupying natural surroundings.
Characteristics of Barbizon and impressionist paint-
ing would continue to play an important part in the
landscape photography of many countries up until the
very end of the century. Both an impressionist optics
and a preference for landscape and peasant subjects
also marked the late nineteenth-century vogue mode of
pictorialist photography—yet another indication of the